Acronym-buster

... and terminology-buster

For the time being - will be a dynamic registry soon

Acronym	description/definition	Responsible
ABS	Australian Bureau of Statistics, a leader in the adoption of SDMX and DDI among NSIs, the project leader of GSIM, and original organizer of the OECD Expert Committee on access to official statistical microdata.
ANDS	Australian National Data Service (research data infrastructure facility)
ANU	Australian National University
ARDC	Australian Research Data Commons - successor to ANDS, nectar, RDS
BIS	Bank for International Settlements, the world's central bank; a sponsor of SDMX.
BPMS	Business Process Management System; a type of web-services-based software for automating the execution of business processes
BPMN	Business Process Modelling Notation; a formal methodology for diagramming business processes, used in many business process management systems.
BPEL	Business Process Execution Language; an XML standard for describing business processes which can be automatically executed by web-services software (typical of BPMS systems).
CDA	The HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is an XML-based markup standard intended to specify the encoding, structure and semantics of clinical documents for exchange. See http://www.hl7.org/implement/standards/product_brief.cfm?product_id=7
CDISC	Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium
CERIF	Common European Research Information Format
CES	Conference of European Statisticians; the second-highest coordinating body in official statistics; international in scope and influence.
CODATA	Committee on Data of the International Science Council
cohort
CORA	See ESSnet CORA
CORE	See ESSnet CORE
CSIRO	Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (Australia)
darta	data
DATS	Data Tag Suite - for biomedical and healthcare data
DC	Dublin Core metadata element set
DCAT	W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary - dataset metadata for catalogues	W3C
DCMI	Dubln Core Metadata Initiative
DDI	Data Description Initiative - social sciences/official statistics	DDI Alliance
DOI	Digital Object Identifier; a form of PID used by DataCite (a project among a group of archives for data citation) and the OECD, among others.
DQV	W3C Data Quality Vocabulary	W3C/DWWG
DSD	data structure definition; the document (in XML and the SDMX Information Model) which describes the structure of an aggregate data set.
EAD	Encoded Archival Description: an XML standard used by digital libraries, and sometimes encountered in the archival community.
ebXML	electronic business XML; a joint project in the late 1990s between UNCEFACT and OASIS, producing many important web-services standards, including a widely adopted registry model.
ECB	European Central Bank - Europe's central bank; a sponsor of SDMX.
EDDI	European DDI User's Group. see http://www.eddi-conferences.eu/ocs/index.php/eddi/index
EDIFACT	Electronic Data Interchange format; a precursor of XML for data exchange between computer applications, used by SDMX (in the form SDMX-EDI, also known as GESMES/TS).
ELSST	See HASSET/ELSST
EML	Ecological Metadata Language
E-R	Entity-Relationship - modeling method for relational database schemas
ESS (1)	European Social Survey (not to be confused with the European Statistical System); a common acronym used by data archives.
ESS (2)	European Statistical System (not to be confused with the European Social Survey); a common acronym used by NSIs and Eurostat.
ESSnet CORA	An ESSnet project involving national statistical agencies and Eurostat to define a Common Reference Architecture, based heavily on the GSBPM. This work is now being carried forward in the ESSnet CORE project.
ESSnet CORE	ESSnet Common Reference Environment, based on the earlier ESSnet CORA work. Involves Eurostat and the national statistical agencies.
FAIR	Principles for research data - Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable - Force-11/CODATA
FHIR	Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources. see http://hl7.org/fhir/
FOR	Fields Of Research - part of the ABS standard research classification
GBIF	Global Biodiversity Information Facility
GESIS	GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
GESMES/TS	a standard for exchanging statistical data (time series), widely adopted by central banks and European statistical agencies, including Eurostat.
GHO	Global Health Observatory
GML	Geography Markup Language	OGC, ISO
GPW	Gridded Population of the World
GSBPM	the Generic Statistical Business Process Model; a reference model for how NSIs and other organizations produce statistical data; published by METIS.
GSIM	the Generic Statistical Information Model; a companion to the GSBPM, currently under development by a group of statistical agencies including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Will eventually be published by METIS if adopted broadly. Central to the alignment of SDMX and DDI as used by NSIs.
HASSET/ELSST	The Humanities and Social Science Electronic Thesaurus, created by UKDA, and used as the basis for ELST (the European Language Social Science Thesaurus) created by CESSDA, which is used to organize collections of data in archives. Has been translated into many European languages.
HASSET	See HASSET/ELSST
HL7	Founded in 1987, Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a not-for-profit, ANSI-accredited standards developing organization dedicated to providing a comprehensive framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information that supports clinical practice and the management, delivery and evaluation of health services. [The "7" refers to the seventh layer in the ISO OSI stack - the application layer.
HLG-BAS	High-Level Group for Strategic Directions in Business Architecture in Statistics; a committee formed by the CES for coordinating business architectures in the official statistics community, advocating the use of the GSBPM, GSIM, and CORE developments, and thus the joint use of DDI and SDMX.
IASSIST	International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology: a long-running annual conference heavily attended by data librarians and archivists, and increasingly by statistical producers. A major event in the DDI calendar every year.
ICSU	International Council for Science - superseded by ISC
ICPSR	Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research; the largest American data archive and the organization which is home to the DDI Alliance.
IDDO	Infectious Diseases Data Observatory
IECM	Integrated European Census Microdata (European implementation of IPUMS).
IHSN	International Household Survey Network: a joint effort by the World Bank and many UN agencies and the OECD, creating DDI-based tools for statistical agencies in the developing world.
IPUMS	Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: a set of internationally harmonized public-use microdata files of census data, lead by the Minnesota Population Center in the US. For Europe, see IECM.
ISC	International Science Council
ISO	International Organization for Standardization
ISO 11179	ISO/IEC 11179 Metadata Registries: a standard describing how data elements, terms, and concepts can be modelled and managed; foundational to both SDMX and DDI.
ISO 11404	ISO/IEC 11404 Information Technology - General-Purpose Datatypes
ISO 19115	Geographic Information - Metadata. Several parts, released sequentially. Original 2006, 19115-2 extensions for acquisition and imagery; 19115-1, and update to the 2006 version; 19115-3 specifies an xml interchange format for 19115-1 and 19115-2.	ISO/TC 211
ISO 19156	Geographic Information - Observations and Measurements	ISO/TC 211
JSON	Javascript Object Notation - object data serialization for transfer, most common format used by web developers
JSON-LD	JSON Linked Data - JSON augmented with web links to definitions - also an RDF format
LMIC	Low/middle income country
LOINC	Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes - database and universal standard for identifying medical laboratory observations
LTER	Long Term Ecological Research Network
MDA	Microdata Access (formerly known as the Nuremberg Group); an informal collaboration of research data centres and other organisations discussing different approaches to secure microdata access. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cros/content/microdata-access_en
METIS	UN/ECE Statistical Metadata Working Group - Attended by most European (and many international) NSIs and international statistical organisations; organised by Eurostat, the OECD, and the UN; publisher of the GSBPM.
METS	Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: an XML standard way of describing related digital objects to be managed as a package within a digital library or archive.
MSD	metadata structure definition; the document (in XML and the SDMX Information Model) which describes the structure of a reference metadata set.
MSIS	Meeting on the Management of Statistical Information Systems: a bi-annual meeting of technology managers within the official statistics community, organised by UN/ECE, Eurostat, and the OECD. A sibling conference to METIS.
NADA	National Data Archive: an open-source tool developed by the IHSN to expose catalogs of surveys online. Developed by the IHSN and increasingly deployed by the statistical agencies of developing countries.
NORC	National Opinion Research Center; a non-profit associated with the University of Chicago in the US, and a major player in American political opinion research; has pioneered one model of secure remote access to microdata.
OAIS	A reference model for archiving data, originally developed by NASA and other organizations dealing with huge amounts of data. Now an ISO standard (ISO 14721). Very popular among national data archives.
OAI-ORE	Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange: a protocol for describing connected publications, data, and other resources.
OAI-PMH	Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting - a mechanism for sharing metadata between archives using a harvesting technique. Used within CESSDA to help drive the CESSDA portal.
OASIS	a standards body based in the US; produces many domain-specific specifications and standards, mostly using XML. Sponsor of ebXML.
OCMIMF	Operationalise a Common Metadata/Information Management Framework: an activity being undertaken by the Statistical Network", an informal collaboration between several national statistical agencies to share models and technology to support the vision of statistical production as a form of industrial production. "
OGC	Open Geospatial Consortium
ORG	The Organization Ontology (W3C)	W3C
OSI	Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) - is a conceptual model that characterises and standardises the communication functions of a telecommunication or computing system without regard to its underlying internal structure and technology. There are 7 'layers': see https://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp
OWL	W3C Web Ontology Language	W3C
O-O	Object oriented
O&M	Geographic Information - Observations and measurements Same as ISO 19156	OGC
PID	persistent identifier, important for data citation and preservation.
Policy
population
PREMIS	Preservation Metadata Implementation Strategies, an XML standard and data dictionary widely used by data archives and digital libraries, with strong ties to METS and the OAIS model.
Profile
PROV	W3C Provenance model	W3C
PROV-O	W3C Provenance Ontology	W3C
PUF	Public Use Files (PUF) are files containing records on individual respondents (persons, households, business entities) anonymised in such a way that the respondent cannot be identified either directly (by name, address, social security number etc.) or indirectly (by combining different - especially rare - characteristics of respondents: age, occupation, education etc.) They are often made publicly available, e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/microdata/public-microdata
QB	W3C RDF Data cube vocabulary - implementation of SDMX	W3C
R	a programming language and free software environment for statistical computing and graphics	R Foundation for Statistical Computing
RDA	Research Data Alliance
RDA	Research Data Australia
RDA	Resource Description and Access ... is a standard for descriptive cataloguing initially released in June 2010, providing instructions and guidelines on formulating bibliographic data. Intended for use by libraries and other cultural organisations such as museums and archives, RDA is the successor to Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition(AACR2).	ALA, CFLA, CILIP
RDC	research data centre; the common English-language acronym for a secure data facility.
RDF	W3C Resource Description Framework	W3C
REST	REpresentational State Transfer - A form of application interface which uses URLs to invoke web services; the term RESTful" is often used to describe applications which implement this type of interface."
RIF-CS	Registry Interchange Format - Collections and Services - XML-based data interchange format for supporting the electronic exchange of collection and service descriptions (metadata)
RM-ODP	Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing
sample
schema.org	A set of metadata tags to be embedded in web pages to facilitate search engine indexing - a joint initiative of Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Yandex
SDMX	Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange
SKOS	W3C Simple Knowledge Organization System	W3C
SSN	W3C Semantic Sensor Network Ontology	W3C
SNOMED-CT	see http://www.snomed.org Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine -- Clinical Terms, A comprehensive clinical terminology
SOA	Service-Oriented Architecture; a set of standards produced by OASIS, describing a common style of technology architecture employing web services and related technologies.
SOSA	W3C Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator vocabulary	W3C
SOAP	Simple Object Access Protocol: an XML web-services standard used by web-services applications to exchange queries and data. Not used by sensible people.
Standard
Summary statistics
technical specification
TEI	Text Encoding Initiative; a standard for marking up free text in XML for documentation and preservation purposes, used by some archives for non-quantitative data.
Turtle	Terse RDF Triple Language - a readable RDF data format	W3C
UDDI	Universal Description, Discovery and Integration. A web-services standard now published by OASIS for exposing web services resources, and the services themselves, as an electronic catalogue for use by web services applications. Not used by sensible people.
UML	Unified Modelling Language - graphical standard for object-oriented information and systems	OMG
UN-CEFACT	a part of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, focused on international trade facilitation, which publishes the EDIFACT standard used by SDMX-EDI, and a sponsor of ebXML.
UNECE	United Nations Economic Commission for Europe; the organisational home of the Conference of European Statisticians, METIS, and MSIS.
unit
universe
UNSC	United Nations Statistical Committee; the most important coordinating body for official statistics, composed of the heads of statistics of each NSI.
UNSD	United Nations Statistical Division; a sponsor of SDMX.
USP
View
vocabulary
vocabulary (RDF)
WADL	Web application Description Language: an XML standard for describing web services based on the popular REST protocol. Similar to WSDL.	W3C
Walled garden	Set of coupled services hosted on standard (e.g. web) infrastructure, but only loosely adhering to public web standards, with the intention of keeping users inside a restricted ecosystem - e.g. Facebook
WSDL	Web Services Description Language: an XML standard used by web-services technology to describe the functions and formats needed by client applications to integrate with the described web service. Assumes the use of SOAP as an exchange protocol. Similar to WADL. Not used by sensible people.	W3C
W3C	World Wide Web Consortium
XBRL	Extensible Business Reporting Language; an XML standard for businesses making financial reports to the government; important as a source of micro-data going to central banks for banking supervisory purposes.
XML	W3C eXtensible Markup Language	W3C
XSD	XML Schema Definition	W3C